Your Story, My Story

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Abstract LIFE AND LETTERS about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. When Sylvia Plath committed suicide, early in the morning of February 11, 1963, she ceased to be merely a poet and became, like Thomas Chatterton, a symbol, a warning, a myth. Their importance had very little to do with their work. For the feminists, Plath was a terrible example of the raw deal women must expect in a world dominated by men... Since Plath's death, Hughes has become Britain's poet laureate--the first major poet to hold the post since Tennyson--and has published a dozen collections of poetry and 5 books of prose, as well as anthologies and a number of books for children. But he has written very little about his wife and nothing at all about their life together. The publication of "Birthday Letters" shows that his reticence was for public consumption only and that in private for the last 30 years he has been gradually telling himself the story of his life with Plath in poems. "Birthday Letters" is an extraordinary book, a sequence of fairly short poems that reads like a novel. Hughes's poems are full of references to hers. One or two--"The Rabbit Cather," for example--are even straight rewritings, the same incident viewed from the other side of the mirror; in other words, they are scenes from a marriage, Hughes's take on the life they shared... Their courtship was brief and dramatic. Hughes seems never quite to have lost his sense of Plath's foreignness, her freedom, her innocent, outsized response to a world he took for granted. Beneath the glitter, she was a girl with a load of troubles on her back: a suicide attempt that had almost succeeded, a nightmare series of electroshock treatments, and, behind all that, an adored Prussian father who scared her stiff and died when she was eight. Hughes calls her father "The Minotaur," and many of the "Birthday Letters" chart Plath's gradual, fatal descent into his lair... Finally, provoked by his wife's violence into blind rage, he unwittingly handed her the key she had been looking for. Always the good student, she went down into the cellarage, key in hand. But the ghouls she released were malign. They helped her write the great poems first collected in "Ariel," but they destroyed her marriage, and then they destroyed her. Accompanying the article are eight poems from Hughes's "Birthday Letters": "Fulbright Scholars," "Fidelity," "A Pink Wool Knitted Dress," "A Dream," "The Literary Life," "The Minotaur," "Robbing Myself," and "Freedom of Speech."